This invention relates generally to food processing machinery, and, more particularly, to machinery for releasing and removing food products adhered to support surfaces.
As will be known to persons familiar with home-scale and industrial-scale food processing, food products often adhere to supporting surfaces upon which they are prepared. For example, the underside of a piece of meat may adhere to the surface of a cooking pan when the meat rests in the pan during cooking. When the cook attempts to free the stuck meat or other food product, the integrity of the piece may be lost, with the result that the food is ruined or at least made less attractive in appearance.
The usual solution to the problem of food products that stick to surfaces is to attempt to avoid the sticking problem in the first place. Surfaces may be coated to inhibit sticking, as with the use of a tefloncoated pan or the placing of grease into a fry pan to prevent sticking. The use of cooking racks or special procedures for suspending food products during processing can also be used in some situations.
The problem of sticking can be particularly troublesome where the food product is in the form of a thin strip or sheet. If a thin strip or sheet sticks to an underlying support surface, freeing of the thin piece is made even more difficult, and a major portion of the thin piece may be lost during the process of releasing it from the support surface. The freeing of a thin piece of food product is complicated even further when the piece is stuck over a large portion of its surface area, and when the food product is relatively fragile. While the releasing of such food products from supporting surfaces can be a problem in a home environment, the problem is magnified in the food processing industry and can often pose a major obstacle to the automation of food preparation processes.
In some commercial-scale food preparation operations, it is not possible to coat the supporting surfaces or otherwise suspend the food product so that sticking is completely avoided. As an example, meat jerky may be prepared on a commercial scale for human or animal consumption by preparing a meat-containing mixture and extruding the mixture through a die to form a strip. The strip is extruded onto a tray having apertures through the bottom thereof, to support the strip during further processing. The presence of the apertures is desirable, as in the next step the strips of extruded meat product, supported by the tray, are placed into a drying oven wherein the moisture contained in the extruded strip is removed by heating at a relatively low temperature. The apertures permit greater air circulation to accelerate drying.
During the drying operation, the extruded meat strips usually stick to the traps for two reasons. First, proteinaceous material contained within the meat can bake onto the interface between the support surface and the strip to bind the meat strip to the tray. Second, and more importantly, during the drying operation the strips of meat tend to sag into the apertures, thence becoming physically engaged to the apertures as the meat dries.
In the past, the usual way to free the adhered strips of meat from the tray, after drying is completed, was to invert the tray and impact the tray against a hard surface, to jar the meat strips loose so that they fall from the tray. Another approach is to attempt to force a knife between the strip of dried meat and the surface of the tray bottom to which it has adhered. Both of these approaches suffer from a severe disadvantage, in that the dried meat strip is fragile and tends to break into short lengths when so released. The short broken lengths are not readily packaged for sale to the consumer. In some cases, the short pieces are unacceptable for commercial sales and must be discarded, resulting in substantial waste. Further, these two methods of releasing the meat product from the tray are highly labor intensive and substantially increase the cost of the final product.
Accordingly, there has been an ongoing need for a process and apparatus for releasing and removing fragile food products such as strips of dried, extruded meat from supporting surfaces to which they have adhered. The apparatus must gently release the food product to avoid breakage and waste. The apparatus should be compatible with existing processing machinery to avoid large capital expenditures, and preferably provide the separated food product to further processing machinery in an orderly presentation, to facilitate yet further automation of the processing. The present invention fufills this need, and further provides related advantages.